Sunday, October 26, 2014

Longer Plover Coding Snippet in Python


New Video!


I've been meaning to do this for a while, but our delightfully inexplicable appearance on Hacker News this morning finally gave me the buttkick I needed to just sit down and do it. The previous Python coding snippet I recorded with Plover was only 25 seconds long, and I realized I needed something more substantial to show programmers how easily it can be done. For some reason, people often assume that writing punctuation and special characters in steno is harder than writing words or phrases. Obviously that's not the case (and I don't understand why people think it would be), but this seemed like the simplest way to demonstrate that.

From my video description:

This is me transcribing some of the code from Plover's codebase, using Plover and a steno machine. I didn't write this code, since I'm only a Python novice. It was originally written by Plover's awesome developers. But I transcribed it from a text file into Vim to demonstrate how easily and fluently code can be written with steno. It's not primarily about speed, but about chunking commands and words into single strokes, as opposed to breaking them down into individual letters and typing each letter out one by one as in qwerty. Also notice how simple error correction is; an incorrect word is deleted with a single stroke. For more information, visit: http://openstenoproject.org

There is no audio in this demonstration, so no captions are needed.
RUND for _
PL*US for +
KLN for :
TROETS for """
MAO*UT for META_
PRENZ for ()
PRE*NS for () and then move the cursor left so it's inside the parentheses
L*EN for len() and then move the cursor left
KWA*LS for =
SR-RS for move cursor to the end of the line
SR*RS for move cursor to the end of the line and press enter

2 comments:

Unknown said...

That was really cool. It would be nice to see you coding for real also. I mean, that you would solve a small coding problem so that you would go back and forth in the code, editing it, moving code snippets around, correcting typos, etc. Because that is how you program. You don't write code line by line.

Mirabai Knight said...

I really wish I could, but unfortunately my coding skills are pretty minimal. I am planning to release a video of me navigating around a Vim document and editing some prose, the way I do with my daily captioning work.